There’s no shelf large enough to hold all the books of advice on how to write. But only one sound piece ever stayed with me. To be a writer you must do two things: read and write.

Photo: Marie-Reine Mattera

I grew up a reader. A classic flashlight-under-the-bedspread case, tearing through Nancy Drew mysteries and little blue biographies of fabulous women like Jane Adams. I loved Toby Tyler, the stories of a boy who ran away to join to the circus.

My own adventurous streak was hankering to turn 16 and get my driver’s license so I could run away to...wait for it...the library. Nerdvana.

It almost feels like cheating that half of my job is doing what I love. When I’m struggling at the keyboard, I can go sit on a beach with a novel and justify it as “genre studies.” Toes in the sand is my favorite place to turn pages, but books are like jeans. They suit anywhere—against my pillows, on the bus, under a hair dryer.

It’s remarkable that every story ever written is just a different combination of 26 letters. I never lose my awe for the best in the craft. As a writer, I’m always reading, always refining. Luckily, my homework suits me. I primarily like thrillers. Sometimes I wish I strayed further from my own genre, but mostly I’m a happy captive of curiosity and admiration for my peers. It’s the perennial challenge of ‘so many books, too little time.’

I read with a pen. I can’t help myself. When I see a turn of phrase or elegant prose that stops me in my tracks, I underline or make notes. The ink forges a bond with the writer, both tribute and aspiration. A hybrid of kudos, and damn-I-wish-I’d-written-that. Not plagiarism, but hopes of absorbing skill to elevate my style. Like a basketball team reviewing tapes of a competitor’s game, I hope to always improve from exposure to the best.

I’ll be straight, I like dark. I like to see humanity sans make-up, to peek into those battered houses I see from the train. Crime novels take you to worlds gritty and raw, places that (hopefully) most of us never personally encounter. Honest glimpses of darkness, safely contained in fictional cages. Why the attraction? These tales are buoyed by a common nugget of morality. Crime writers pen the worst of humanity, yet with an unshakeable conviction of its goodness. To me, none can surpass author Raymond Chandler.

Given his long shadow, you can easily forget that Chandler published only seven novels. He wasn’t the founding father of hardboiled American noir, but he was a cornerstone. His protagonist Philip Marlowe is the blueprint for the gumshoe as a tired latter-day knight, jaded and sporting bruises, but still able to rescue a citizen in distress. Solitary, wisecracking, hard-drinking, sentimental, tough. A flawed Don Quixote motivated, in the end, by honor and decency. Marlowe says in Playback, “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.” Chandler describes his detective as “a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.” We thriller writers couldn’t agree more. Chandler’s archetype heralds many of today’s beloved crime-novel protagonists. One glance at a Temperance Brennan novel shows that I am clearly among the beneficiaries of Chandler’s rich legacy.

Chandler’s greatest strength lies not in intricate plotting or in the whammy of the surprise twist ending, but in the masterful use of the English language. His creative metaphors, vivid descriptions, and crisp, sharp dialogue are unsurpassed. Chandler’s first short story, published in the pulp rag Black Mask was so well honed that not one phrase could be cut. Now that’s expertise.

Chandler could describe a character without a single descriptive word. Ugly is: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” Pretty is: “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Magic. The whodunit matters little. What is important is the style - pure Chandler.

The same goes for setting. Marlowe’s turf is the Los Angeles of the forties and fifties, an urban patchwork of seedy hotels, smoky nightclubs, upscale bars, and dingy train and bus stations. The settings are a mélange of the stark and the glitzy, the sleazy and the swanky. Chandler recreates the place and time so vibrantly the reader can see, hear, smell, and feel it. His images of a Southern California in squalor and in splendor remain etched on the mind.

Without Chandler, the hardboiled crime tale would still exist thanks to Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others but it would lack the literary polish. Chandler wasn’t a great thriller writer, he was a great writer. Often imitated, rarely duplicated, Chandler’s voice is the siren song to all crime writers. I’m a willing victim, happy to be snared by his lyrical prose. Try him. You’ll be a blissful victim, too.

KATHY REICHS is the author of 16 New York Times bestselling novels featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Like her protagonist, Reichs is a forensic anthropologist—one of only around a hundred ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. A professor in the department of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she is the former vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and serves on the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada. Reichs’s own life, as much as her novels, is the basis for the TV show Bones, one of the longest-running series in the history of the Fox network.

This "Writers on Reading" essay was originally published in "At the Scene" eNews September 2014 as a first-look exclusive to our enewsletter subscribers. For more special content available first to our enewsletter subscribers, sign up here.

Teri Duerr

2014-09-15 18:25:50

There’s no shelf large enough to hold all the books of advice on how to write. But only one sound piece ever stayed with me. To be a writer you must do two things: read and write.

Malcolm Braly: The Patron Saint of Losers

Ed Gorman

Braly's 1967 prison novel, On the Yard, is an underappreciated American masterpiece.

Malcolm Braly (1925–1980) was born in Portland, Oregon. Abandoned by his parents, Braly lived between foster homes and institutions for delinquent children, and by the time he was forty had spent nearly seventeen years in prison for burglary, serving time at Nevada State Prison, San Quentin, and Folsom State Prison. He wrote three novels behind bars, Felony Tank (1961), Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963), and It's Cold Out There (1966), and upon his release in 1965 began to work on On the Yard. When prison authorities learned of the book they threatened to revoke his parole, and he was forced to complete it in secret. Published in 1967, after Braly's parole had expired, On the Yard received wide acclaim. It was followed by his autobiography, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), and a final work of fiction, The Protector (1979). Malcolm Braly enjoyed fifteen years of freedom before his death in a car accident at age fifty-four.

—from the 2002 New York Review of Books Classics edition of On The Yard by Malcolm Braly, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem.

It's always struck me as strange that in all the nostalgia and excitement over the old Gold Medals, the best serious novelist of them all is rarely mentioned.

We have editor/sage Knox Burger to thank for the far too brief literary career of Malcolm Braly. Burger visited San Quentin when he was editor of Gold Medal in the early '60s and encouraged Braly to write.

Truman Capote, hot again after In Cold Blood, pronounced Braly’s On the Yard one of the best prison novels ever written. Some reviewers compared it favorably with Dostoevsky. It is an important American novel—a masterpiece—that has been allowed to languish. It is now back in print thanks to New York Review of Books Classics, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem.

The Gold Medals include Felony Tank, Shake Him Till He Rattles, and It's Cold out There. All three are fine pieces of craft, alternately heartbreaking and terrifying. In Tank, a young man experiences jail life for the first time.

Shake Him Till He Rattles is the best novel I've ever read about the intersection of the Beats and criminals in the San Francisco heyday of Neal Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, etc. I'm pretty sure Braly read John D. MacDonald's The Price of Murder before he undertook the book—although Jonathan Craig wrote a similar book before MacDonald, Come Night, Come Evil—but Braly's is by far the better of the two. It is a very precisely written and observed novel about how rich women slummed in the Beat bars of the time and how a cop persecuted the novel's protagonist. It is grim, bleak, and one of the best novels Gold Medal ever published. Bill Crider, for one, thinks Shake Him is even better than On the Yard.

Cold Out is not as successful but it is every bit as fascinating. It’s the tale of how an ex-con who is desperately in need of money to keep his parole officer happy sells encyclopedias door to door (a miserable job I—and Don Westlake’s Dortmunder—once had), and how this leads him to get involved with a handful of strange people who live in the same apartment building. The woman, a beautiful but mentally ill innocent, who reminds me of the Marilyn Monroe character in Don't Bother to Knock, inadvertently leads him to his doom. The second act is especially wobbly but the characters (reminiscent of a Philip K. Dick crew, actually) are powerful enough to take your head off.

Braly was the patron saint of losers. I saw him on Johnny Carson one night when On the Yard was in vogue. He was a big guy with a high-pitched laugh. There was that shambling Beat sorrow to him that not even his laugh could disguise. Carson looked alternately baffled and afraid.

Winters, whose profile graces the current issue of Mystery Scene, has sold a new novel, called Underground Airlines, to Josh Kendall at Mulholland Books.

Underground Airlines is described as an “epic contemporary detective story,” according to Publishers Weekly, set in an alternate world in which the Civil War never happened and slavery still exists in the American South. The novel follows an undercover agent trying to capture an escaped slave.

On his website, Winters says that "the hero of Underground Airlines is seriously about as different from Detective Palace as you can imagine, both as a person and as a type of hero. And while the Policeman series was about the end of the world, about death and how we live with death, this book is about race and racism, it’s about grief, it’s about the horror of American slavery (and in particular the Constitutional nightmare of the Fugitive Slave Law), and it’s about compromise."

Sounds intriguing.

Publication is planned for spring 2016, Winters told me in an email

Winters’ Last Policeman trilogy about a pre-apocalyptic planet brought him a spot on the New York Times Best Sellers List, critical acclaim, a solid readership, and awards.

Winters’ first in the series, The Last Policeman, earned the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original from the Mystery Writers of America, was named one of the Best Books of 2012 by Amazon.com and Slate, and was nominated for the Macavity Award for Best Mystery by Mystery Readers International. The second in the trilogy, Countdown City, won the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished original science fiction paperback and was named an NPR Best Book of 2013. The final novel in the series, World of Trouble, hit bookstores and reading devices this past July

Winters, who has written titles for adults and children, also is the author of the bestselling Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Oline Cogdill

2014-09-17 03:24:01

Lawrence Block's "A Walk Among the Tombstones": 3 Stars

A Walk Among the Tombstones shows that maybe, just maybe, filmmakers finally understand Lawrence Block’s novels.

Based on Block’s 10th novel, with elements from A Dance at the Slaughterhouse and The Sins of the Fathers, A Walk Among the Tombstones captures the spirit of the Matt Scudder novels, especially the nuances of character, while also giving a brisk, action-packed plot packed with creepy villains who are chillingly real.

And Liam Neeson, who has fashioned himself into a not-to-be-messed-with action hero, proves himself to be the perfect Scudder, the former NYPD cop turned unlicensed private investigator.

Is he the Scudder I envisioned when reading the novels? Now that I think about it, yeah, he is.

Hollywood has never been as kind to the prolific Block as it has to the late Elmore Leonard or, more recently, to Dennis Lehane.

Films such as Get Shorty and Jackie Brown and the FX series Justified have captured Leonard’s combination of serious plot, wry wit, and pitch-perfect dialogue. Lehane’s novels such as Mystic River and The Drop, which opened last week and which we reviewed, not only have captured the spirit of his books, but have embraced and enhanced his vivid vision.

While several screen treatments are attributed to Block (you can look up imdb.com, too), there have been only two major movies based on his novels, and neither did his books proud. The 1986 film 8 Million Ways to Die with Jeff Bridges as Block’s perennial antihero Matt Scudder was just all right, though good luck trying to correlate the film with the 1982 novel. Then there was the “what on earth were they thinking?”Burglar released in 1987 and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Block’s “gentleman burglar” Bernie Rhodenbarr. The less said about that film, the better.

And now we have A Walk Among the Tombstones, the film that Block fans have been waiting for, well, since the series began in 1976 with The Sins of the Father.

In A Walk Among the Tombstones, Scudder reluctantly agrees to help heroin trafficker Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) find the men who kidnapped and brutally murdered his wife. Scudder has little use for Kenny the drug dealer but he relates to the man’s grief over his wife. As he investigates, Scudder soon realizes that this is not the first time that the loved ones of drug dealers have been targeted.

As Scudder prowls the backstreets and marginal neighborhoods of New York City, he is aided by Kenny’s addict brother Kenny (Boyd Holbrook) and the homeless teenager TJ (Brian “Astro” Bradley), a character who first appeared in Block’s 1991 A Dance at the Slaughterhouse. Meanwhile, the vicious murderers Ray (David Harbour) and Albert (Adam David Thompson) have targeted another victim.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is fairly faithful to the essential plot of Block’s novel. The action and the hunt for the murderers are spot-on.

Gone is Scudder’s relationship with Elaine, a wise move; while it works well in the books, it would have muddied the film’s plot. The screenplay carefully doles out what prompted Scudder to leave the NYPD; if viewers aren’t familiar with the books they will think they know why in the first half hour, but there is more to come.

The violence level in A Walk Among the Tombstones is high, but no higher than your typical thriller and the violence is not gratuitous. But be prepared.

Neeson’s Scudder is how Block has shaped this character—world-weary, resigned to a lifetime of guilt. He has seen too much of the seedy side of life, yet still believes in justice. A man of violence who now abhors violence, Scudder is, nonetheless, prepared to do what he has to do. We want more Scudder movies and with Neeson as the private investigator.

Although a trivia question at the film’s preview asked which PBS series Dan Stevens starred in, the people behind us still didn’t believe that this steely-eyed, dark-haired drug trafficker was the same actor who also had played the aristocratic (and blond) Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. Stevens is virtually unrecognizable in A Walk Among the Tombstones and his transformation again shows what an intense, skillful actor he is. Stevens’ Kenny Kristo would never be mistaken for Crawley, the would-be heir to Downton Abbey who is Lord Grantham's third cousin once removed. Stevens also is starring in the new thriller The Guest, which also is a long way from a dapper British aristocrat.

The supporting cast also works well to give life to the film. Adam David Thompson (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and David Harbour (Elliot Hirsch on The Newsroom, Reed Akley on Manhattan) embrace the chilling criminals and their odd relationship. Boyd Holbrook (Milk, The Big C, Hatfields & McCoys) takes the typical drug-addict character and imbues him with a complexity. Brian “Astro” Bradley (Earth to Echo) shows the survival mentality of this intelligent kid of the streets. And if you are wondering where you saw Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, who plays the groundskeeper; he played the groundskeeper in True Detective.

Director Scott Frank, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps the plot moving at a fast clip, while lingering over the seedy sides of New York City during the 1990s where the film is set. Frank is best known as a screenwriter for films such as The Wolverine, Marley and Me, and Minority Report.

There never seems to be a definitive answer to the number of books attributed to Block, a four-time Edgar Award winner, among other awards, including being named Grand Master in 1994 by the Mystery Writers of America. He began his writing career in the mid-1950s, in a variety of genres, and has written under several pseudonyms. It has been said that he has written anywhere from 150 to 200 novels and that number actually seems low to me.

No matter the exact number, Block has been on the ground floor of the mystery genre’s transformation. His Matt Scudder novels went from an old-school basic sleuth to one whose interior motivation was as important as the crimes he helped solved while, at the same time, never veering from the tenets that what makes a good detective. Scudder has never stayed in one place emotionally, but has evolved through the approximately 17 novels and various short stories that Block has written about him.

Scudder also was one of the first mystery fiction characters to acknowledge his alcoholism and try to get a handle on it. Scudder’s AA meetings are an important part of the novels and his understanding of the 12 Steps and how these relate to him and his quest for redemption and justice are a major part of the series. The film A Walk Among the Tombstones shows Scudder’s struggles with his addiction and how the meetings are, for a long time, his only lifeline to people.

Now that Matt Scudder has been well represented on film—and, please, give us another with Neeson—it’s time to think of another Block character I always thought would make a good film. Keller, a lonely, wistful hit man, was the subject of Block’s four episodic novels, starting with Hit Man (1998), and one full-length novel, Hit and Run (2008).

It seems like 1992 was just yesterday when M.C. Beaton introduced us to the prickly, intelligent Agatha Raisin in Agatha Raisin and The Quiche of Death.

Who knew that charming, witty novel in which Agatha Raisin accidently kills the judge of a baking contest with a store-bought quiche would lead to 25 visits to the Cotswolds where she moved after retiring from her high-profile job in London?

All Agatha wanted was a quiet, peaceful life.

But the Cotswolds prove to be anything but that. And Agatha moved from being a “retiree” to finding a second career as the owner of a detective agency. Well, she did want to reinvent herself by moving to the Cotswolds.

This month The Blood of an Englishman marks the 25th Agatha Raisin novel, and like the others, Beaton delivers a funny, yet thoughtful novel.

In The Blood of an Englishman, Agatha attends a local play—the title Babes in the Woods is enough to set her teeth on edge. While she is busy yawning, the village’s popular baker is murdered on stage. As she investigates, Agatha soon discovers that community theater is fraught with politics, power struggles and fights.

The Agatha Raisin series is considered one of the longest running cozy series by an author who is still with us.

Entertainment Weekly once stated “Agatha is like Miss Marple with a drinking problem, pack-a-day habit, and major man lust.”That sounds about right.

You might say I also interviewed Sarah Chester, Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Marion Gibbons, Jennie Tremaine, Charlotte Ward, all names under which she has written. And, of course, there is her real name, Marion Chesney.

When Beaton began writing about Agatha, most female sleuths were young, just establishing their careers and generally in their early 30s.

Not so Agatha.

When the series began, Agatha was 53 years old and retiring at the height of her career in public relations. Divorced, Agatha generally picked the wrong man. Her obsessiveness, her totally unpolitically correct approach to life and her rudeness belied a vulnerability that connected with readers, as did the fact that she was an entrepreneur who built up her own business.

“I wanted to create someone you might not like but who you wanted to win out in the end,” said Beaton during our interview.

Here’s hoping that Agatha, who has become one of readers’ favorite sleuths, never retires.

Photo of M.C. Beaton by Louise Bowls

Oline Cogdill

2014-09-23 19:41:50

ACE ATKINS, REED COLEMAN AND ROBERT B. PARKER

Robert B. Parker died in 2010, but Spenser, his iconic Boston private eye, and Jesse Stone, the police chief in the small town of Paradise, Massachusetts, continue.

Ace Atkins’s third novel about Spenser, Robert B. Parker’s Cheap Shot came out in May and Reed Farrel Coleman’s first Jesse Stone novel Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot was published earlier this month. Both novels landed on bestsellers list and each author is signed to produce more novels about Parker’s characters.

In addition, Atkins continues his own series about Quinn Colson, a former U.S. Ranger who returns to his Mississippi hometown; the latest of which is The Forsaken. Coleman, who wrote the Moe Prager novels, will be launching new series about a cop in 2015.

Mystery Scene caught up with Atkins and Coleman to discuss what it’s like to continue the characters created by a master of the genre as well as putting their own spin on these characters.

QUESTION: What are the challenges about picking up Parker’s mantle?ATKINS: The expectations of fans and the high quality of Bob’s work. After all, he was a true master. As a longtime fan, you try not to think whose running shoes you're trying on. To paraphrase what Spenser says to Sixkill in Bob's last novel, just do the job you've been training to do. I'm now on my 16th novel and the fourth Spenser.

COLEMAN: It’s a bit of a high wire act to take over a successful series from anyone, but especially from one of the most gifted, well-loved, well-respected authors in the genre’s history. But I suppose the greatest challenge for me was not to focus on whose shoes I was trying to fill and to approach Blind Spot the way I would approach any of my other projects. That is to say, to write the best book I could write.

QUESTION: What are the drawbacks?COLEMAN: The universe I was working in, the characters I was writing were not of my own creation. So I had to find doorways into Bob’s universe and into Jesse Stone’s head. This is a very different process for me than to work in a universe I’ve created and to write for characters that came from within me. But a professional has to find a way to take drawbacks and turn them into benefits. I think I did and I found a great joy in it.

ATKINS: The drawbacks of Spenser are minor, mainly that his world and the characters are firmly in place. I don't think anyone wants to see Spenser and Susan break up. Or a major character exit the stage. But that much said, do expect a few surprises in future books in the Boston underworld.

QUESTION: Do you have any tricks or things you do to get into Parker’s mind set?ATKINS: I do. One of my superstitions to warm up is to listen to jazz piano great, Dave McKenna. McKenna was not only a legendary musician but a mainstay of Boston. I know Parker was a fan and to me McKenna plays the true Spenser soundtrack. I just hear a few notes and I’m in that world.

COLEMAN: I tried to stay away from putting myself in Bob Parker’s head. I think that would have been a dangerous way for me to go. I took a very external approach. I reread all the Jesse Stone novels and tried to keep my writing in line with the physical structure of Mr. Parker’s. My focus was mostly on staying true to the essential nature of the characters, especially Jesse’s, Molly’s and Suit’s.

QUESTION: Had either of you met Parker before his death?COLEMAN: Kate’s Mystery Books [in Boston] used to have big Christmas parties. Kate would invite authors from all over New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to come and be part of it. It was at Kate’s I met Dennis Lehane, the late Jerry Healy, and many other Boston based authors. At one of these parties, I was privileged to have shaken hands and chatted for a few minutes with Bob Parker. He was gracious and a gentleman, though I’m sure he had no idea who I was. But somehow, having met him and Joan Parker, made me feel better about taking on Jesse Stone.

ATKINS:I never met Bob. I corresponded with him for a bit. He was kind enough to blurb my first novel. But truth be told, I don’t think he read it. Bob famously would say, “I can either read your book or blurb it. But I can't do both.” My knowledge of Bob came through a wonderful friendship with the late Joan Parker who taught me a lot about writing Spenser.

QUESTION: Have you been able to put your own spin on these novels?ATKINS: I believe I’ve been able to take my own experiences and inject some fresh ideas into the novels. In Cheap Shot, I drew upon a lifetime of being associated with football—my dad with the NFL and I played at Auburn—to tell an authentic story of that world.

COLEMAN: I think so. From the get go I was determined not to try to imitate Bob Parker’s writing style. I don’t think I would have been able to do either Mr. Parker or Jesse Stone justice by doing so. And I had no desire to try to compete with how brilliantly my friend and colleague Ace Atkins does Spenser. As I alluded to in an earlier answer, my goal was to approach the series by being true to the essential nature Bob Parker created for his characters. I like to think of my approach in terms of photography. I tried to use the same camera as Bob Parker, but with a different lens.

QUESTION: Will you stop your own series to concentrate on the Parker novels?COLEMAN: No. In fact, Putnam has signed me to begin a new series featuring retired Suffolk County (New York) cop cum PI Gus Murphy. The first book in the series, Where It Hurts, should be out in 2015.

ATKINS: Never. I love continuing on the legacy of one of my all-time favorite writers. But the world I’ve created is extremely important to me.

QUESTION: How has doing these books affected your own series?ATKINS: There are Spenser fans who have definitely found my Quinn Colson series. There is no doubt that the themes and ideas in the Parker novels have found their way into my own work.

COLEMAN: It hasn’t really except to say that any writing I do makes me a better writer. So in that sense, doing these books can’t help but improve my work. I hope that writing these novels will help Jesse Stone fans become fans of my other novels.

QUESTION: How many more Parker novels will you be writing?COLEMAN: Currently, I am signed to do four (Blind Spot plus three), but hope to earn the right to carry on for many more.

ATKINS:I am signed up for one more after the one I'm finishing now. Every day it's a pleasure and honor to keep Bob's creations continuing. I look forward to many more.

“My joke answer used to be that I am contractually obligated to finish the last in the trilogy. But now that I finished it, I can’t say that anymore,” said Winters, who is now working on his next novel.

Then he told us the real answer:

“Frankly, I’d just spend time with my family. My kids are young enough that I would try to shield them from that information. I am not a bucket-list person, I wouldn’t be determined to go about my days as before. I’d just want to be with my family,” said Winters, whose children are ages seven, five, and two.

Anthony Price said once that he hoped in his writing to catch something of Faulkner’s “truths of the heart.” He did.

Should a writer ever retire? Some, of course, are forced to by ill health or failing powers. But by and large most mystery writers as they get older defiantly say (all too frequently), “I will never stop.” There have been exceptions. Colin Dexter gave Inspector Morse his famous heart attack in the college quad and said afterwards that he would write no more. Len Deighton seems to have gone into quiet retirement, keeping in touch with the crime world almost solely by sending typically good-mannered apologies for being unable to attend the Detection Club in London. And, most famously of all, Simenon announced one day that he would write no more (but then produced his massive autobiography).

But Anthony Price defied common wisdom when he said, as his much-wished-for retirement from his “day job” as an Oxford newspaper editor came, that, for the time being at least, he was laying to rest his much-hailed, long-running series of espionage novels. But, alas, his wife’s serious illness has meant that he has not yet picked up the pen again.

In consequence, in the terrible way of modern publishing, almost all of his former books have disappeared from view. And they should not have done. Just because a first-class book was written, say, 20 or 30 years ago does not mean that it has ceased to be worth reading today. Yes, the circumstances the novelist described may have altered (the arrival of the cell phone drastically affected many a crime writer), but the core of a good book, its presentation of human beings, remains intact.

Looking through the reviews I wrote for the London Times over most of Price’s heyday, I find the praise I gave his books seems perfectly valid still. In 1970 I chose the arrival of his debut novel, The Labyrinth Makers, to look at the state of espionage fiction in general, commenting that, while Ian Fleming’s Bond had arrived in 1953, we had by now reached the stage where spy authors were using the genre for more than simply outdoing each other in pure adventure tales. And I cited The Labyrinth Makers as doing that “more” by telling us “the way a certain sort of man thinks.” That man was complicated and contradictory David Audley, academic historian (with the broken nose of a former rugby football player) and patriot. The book, I concluded, is one of the ones “you simultaneously want to finish and long to go on for hours yet.”

A couple of years later, at the time Americans began to challenge British domination of espionage fiction with Robert Littell’s fine and thoughtful The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, I had high praise for Price’s Colonel Butler’s Wolf. It was, I said, a “leather-rich” portrait of the Soldier, seen both as involved by chance in Cold War espionage chess and, in days long ago, as manning Hadrian’s Wall at the edge of the Roman Empire.

This intertwining of the past and present was to be a feature of all Price’s work. The Swedish critic K.G. Fredricksen wrote of Price as bringing the “real meaning of history into his novels, as something that happened perhaps a long time ago but still has significance today.” And Price himself once said that he based each book on the private research, or hobby, in which he happened to be engaged at the time. It is this, the hobby factor, that gives his writing that extra intensity, the reward of a series of passionate concerns with “old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.” They enabled basically simple stories to carry much more than you might expect.

Thus his 1975 book Other Paths to Glory, considered by many critics to be his best, contrived simultaneously to be set during the bloody and muddy Battle of the Somme in 1916, and also around a Summit meeting in 1970, the former reflecting on the latter and endowing it with an additional, enriching layer of meaning. “Oh, ingenious and lovely Price,” I said. Also ingenious was his 1975 book Our Man in Camelot (yes, that mythical place made to pre-echo 1970s espionage) and so too, was War Game in 1976 where Cavaliers and Roundheads reflected on Cold War capers. But I could add on indefinitely to this list and still not find room to talk about Price’s delicious way with what I called “jokelets”—the tiny flashes of wit that sparkled all over his pages.

But there is something more substantial contained in that long series. Each book sets out in a different manner to put forward a coherent philosophy of life. They subtly trumpet the virtue of loyalty and the uses of human intelligence (sometimes called scholarship)—a similarity here to the delightful yet deep Sarah Caudwell. Anthony said once that he hoped in his writing to catch something of Faulkner’s “truths of the heart.” He did.

But where today can you find his books to read? Well, books are not so easily destroyed. So here and there in a library you will find a lurking Price. Those treasure troves tucked away in charity shops also await. And look along your own shelves. You never know what may be left neglected there.

AN ANTHONY PRICE READING LIST

The Labyrinth Makers (1970) UK; (1971) US The Alamut Ambush (1971) UK; (1972) US Colonel Butler's Wolf (1972) UK; (1973) US October Men (1973) UK; (1974) US Other Paths to Glory (1974) UK; (1975) US Our Man in Camelot (1975) UK; (1976) US War Game (1976) UK; (1977) US The '44 Vintage (1978) Tomorrow's Ghost (1979) The Hour of the Donkey (1980) Soldier No More (1981) The Old Vengeful (1982) Gunner Kelly (1983) Sion Crossing (1984) Here Be Monsters (1985) For the Good of the State (1986) A New Kind of War (1987) UK; (1988) US A Prospect of Vengeance (1988) The Memory Trap (1989)

H.R.F. Keating received the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 1996 from the Crime Writers’ Association. In addition to his highly regarded literary criticism, he was also the creator of the Inspector Ghote series.

Anthony Price said once that he hoped in his writing to catch something of Faulkner’s “truths of the heart.” He did.

Laura Childs on the the Bookmobile Road to Reading

Laura Childs

From Nancy Drew to James Michener

Up until I was 12 years old, we didn’t have a library in the small Minnesota town where I grew up. You found your books where you could, rifled off your parents’ nightstand, your grandmother’s attic, or packed away in a neighbor’s garage. Then, one day, the Scott County Bookmobile rumbled into town! What a treasure trove it turned out to be, filled with Black Stallion books, Treasure Island, Ivanhoe, Tarzan novels, and Nancy Drew mysteries. After I finally blew through the young adult section, I decided to set my sights on adult novels. Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago had just been published, as had Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, and I had a hankering to find out what they were all about.

Unfortunately, the rather persnickety lady in charge cautioned that I was way too young for these books. My salvation came in the form of my rather progressive mother, who—after a bit of coaching and, yes, arm twisting—checked out James A. Michener’s Hawaii for me. That night, as my eyes danced across pages of dazzling prose, I made up my mind that I, too, would someday become a novelist.

But I didn’t.

I put off novel-writing because it seemed utterly unattainable and became an advertising writer/producer instead. And I was good at it—I racked up Clio Awards and even headed my own advertising and marketing firm for 18 years. But the itch to write a novel was always there, tugging at me, bugging me. When I finally worked up the courage to attempt a full-length manuscript, Mr. Michener once again interceded. This time, it was with his book James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook. I was gob-smacked that he would share his wisdom and techniques, and amazed that his original typewritten pages, complete with edits, scratch-outs, and cramped writing that critiqued himself, served as the illustrations. Those early pages of Michener’s, in all their ragged, first-draft glory, inspired me to release some of my fear and finally start writing in earnest.

Laura Childs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Tea Shop Mysteries, Scrapbook Mysteries, and Cackleberry Club Mysteries. She is currently writing a hard-edged thriller set in the Twin Cities.

This "Writers on Reading" essay was originally published in "At the Scene" eNews October 2014 as a first-look exclusive to our enewsletter subscribers. For more special content available first to our enewsletter subscribers, sign up here.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-02 17:28:16

From Nancy Drew to James Michener

“Gone Girl”: 3 ½ Stars

The most simple and often-used description of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller Gone Girl is that it is the story of a marriage. That description usually is followed by the qualifying phrase “but it’s about much more.”

And that’s true.

Gone Girl is indeed the story of a marriage, and much more—a toxic relationship that grows poisonous by the day; two self-absorbed people who should never have married; those same two people who in their marriage create a third person and hide secrets on top of secrets. It is about the nastiest kind of revenge heaped on one’s spouse, the person you once loved more than anything. And the story is told by two of the most unreliable narrators, each of whom thinks he or she is being honest and is the hero or heroine of this story.

And Gone Girl also is about tabloid journalism with its lack of ethics.

Readers either loved Gone Girl—I know I did—or hated it. Few people who read Gillian Flynn's novel were ambivalent about it. And certainly enough people read it to keep it on the hardcover bestseller lists for months. Currently, it is No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction list.

With all the hype of the novel—and the endless parade of its stars on every conceivable talk show—can the movie version of Gone Girl live up to its reputation?

The good news is: Yes, it does.

And the better news is that the film version of Gone Girl is the exact movie the novel’s readers have wanted and need.

It helps that the author also wrote the screenplay. Some of the novel’s scenes are condensed and some characters are deleted completely. But this works to the film’s advantage. While Gone Girl is still long at two hours and 25 minutes, the deliberate pacing moves quickly. The spirit of the novel is definitely on the screen.

Flynn’s dark script is enhanced by the pitch-perfect direction of David Fincher (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network) and the inspired casting of Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy Dunne. Affleck and Pike skillfully show what emotional con artists Nick and Amy are. You both root for Affleck and Pike and also want to shake them while hoping that you never become friends with either Nick or Amy.

The cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth captures the area’s ambience. OK, full disclosure here: Gone Girl was shot in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which is 30 miles from my hometown. I have spent a lot of time in Cape, as we Southeastern Missourians say, and Gone Girl captures the beauty and nuances of this lovely town.

In Gone Girl, Nick and Amy have moved from their New York City brownstone to North Carthage, Missouri, ostensibly to take care of his mother who was diagnosed with cancer. But really, that was more of an excuse for this once golden couple. Nick and Amy had lost their jobs and didn’t really have any other prospects. So in North Carthage, they have settled. Nick is co-owner of a bar called The Bar with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon) and teaches at the local college.

And Amy, well, what does Amy do all day? She doesn’t work, she hasn’t made any friends and she isn’t thrilled with this small Missouri city. Amy is used to being in control, the center of attention, everyone’s ideal. Here, she is none of that, and certainly not Nick’s focus. As a child, Amy was the prototype for a series of children’s books called “Amazing Amy,” written by her parents. It’s been a long time since she was “amazing” anything.

Nick comes home one day to find what looks like a struggle in the living room. Amy is missing. An investigation launched to find Amy gains national attention and soon the laid-back Nick becomes the main suspect in her disappearance. Nick, after all, doesn’t seem to be the upset husband. He’s a bit too smug, too glib, smiles too frequently, and has a temper. And there is that diary that Amy kept.

Those who have read the novel know what happens next. Those who haven’t read the novel should feel free to read the rest of this review without fear of spoilers.

The supporting cast is, with one exception, also well cast. Kim Dickens, so good in David Simon’s Treme on HBO, nails the role of detective Rhonda Boney, who has doubts about everything in this case. Dickens is joined by the reliable Patrick Fugit as her partner, detective Jim Gilpin.

Missi Pyle revels in her role as a Nancy Grace-like TV personality. Casey Wilson has a nice turn as a neighbor of the Dunnes as does Kathleen Rose Perkins (Episodes) in her one scene as a fame groupie.

Tyler Perry is a revelation as ultra-slick attorney Tanner Bolt, who could get Satan off with a few weeks of community service. Perry should take off Madea’s costume more often. If you need a criminal lawyer, Perry’s Tanner Bolt would be your best bet.

The only miscasting is Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings, Amy’s former boyfriend. I am a huge fan of Harris and would watch him recite the phone book. And I think he can do any role—from comedy, drama, Broadway, Tony Awards host, and beyond. But here, he just doesn’t bring his A-game. Desi needs to be creepy, yet vulnerable. And Harris can certainly handle a role like that as he proved in a 2004 Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode titled “Want.”

Gone Girl makes a successful transition to film. But as always, I recommend the novel. I also think that Flynn’s other novels, Dark Places and Sharp Objects, are even better than Gone Girl.

Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme violence (though I disagree with this as there is only one gruesome scene.) Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.

Our genre truly overflows with many—and I mean many—excellent writers whose work continues to elevate and enhance the genre.

Notice I didn’t say transcend because I firmly believe that the genre is just fine and continues to grow and progress. Those who write other types of books should hope to transcend to the mystery/crime fiction genre.

And we also have a number of editors and publishers who have done terrific jobs at making sure that the novels they are involved with are at the level of excellence that readers deserve.

So hats off to those who are being honored during NoirCon 2014, a conference that pays tribute to all things noir from literature to film to art and poetry. NoirCon will take place October 30 through November 2, 2014, in Philadelphia.

Bronwen Hruska, at right, of Soho Press is being recognized as an outstanding publisher in crime fiction with the Jay and Deen Kogan Award. Hruska has led the way in translation publishing and opened many doors for women in the field. Before she became publisher of Soho, Hruska worked as a journalist and screenwriter for 20 years. Her articles have appeared in myriad publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, and the Village Voice. She also is an author. Her first novel, Accelerated, was published in 2012 by Pegasus Books. Accelerated is about a single father pressured by his eight-year-old son's prestigious school to put the boy on medication for ADD. The novel gives Hruska the opportunity to look at the cutthroat culture of prep schools.

Fuminori Nakamura of Tokyo, Japan, will receive the David Goodis Award for excellence in writing. Nakamura’s many awards for his novels include Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. His novels published by Soho Press include The Thief and Evil and the Mask. The publication of his novel Last Winter, We Parted will coincide with NoirCon 2014.

Author and screenwriter Eddie Muller will receive the Anne Friedberg Award for contribution to noir education and preservation.

The NoirCon conference is produced and headquartered at Society Hill Playhouse in Philadelphia.

The program includes panels on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, parties, movie showings, an awards banquet on the banks of the Delaware River, and a visit to MOCA, the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art.

A few highlights include Muller introducing a special showing of the film The Prowler, written by Dalton Trumbo and first released in 1951, at 1 p.m., Thursday, October 30, at The International House.

Tom Nolan, of The Wall Street Journal, will conduct an interview with Nakamura on Saturday.

Scheduled panels include: The Black Dahlia, Jewish Noir, Existential Noir, The Politics of Noir, A Ross MacDonald Examination, How Springsteen’s Music Shapes Crime Fiction, and Three Minutes of Terror, when every attending writer gets three minutes to share his work or ideas.

For further information call 215-923-0210 or check the website: www.noircon.com.

Oline Cogdill

2014-10-09 02:44:13

Book 'Em, Danno!

Jerome Coopersmith

My Years Writing for Hawaii Five-O

Five-0, the elite crime-fighting branch of the Hawaii State Police, does not exist and never did except in the imagination of its creator, Hollywood producer Leonard Freeman, and in the fantasies of his stable of writers. I was one of those writers for six years of my life.

My involvement began in the late 1960s when I got a call from my agent asking me if I would like to write a television script about cops in Hawaii. My first reaction was to say no. Although I had written many TV scripts, I had graduated to the “theeeatre” (pronounce as Bette Davis would), with three produced plays to my credit, including Baker Street, the Sherlock Holmes musical. I felt degraded by the notion that I, a Broadway playwright (as I saw myself), would be reduced to writing cops-and-robbers television.

But I needed the money, so I called the producer.

“I pitched this thing to the network,” Leonard Freeman said on the phone, “and they’ve commissioned six scripts. I want you to come out here and do one of them.”

“Why me?” I asked. “I’ve never been to Hawaii. I wouldn’t be able to visualize it.”

“One question at a time,” he said. “You, because you wrote Baker Street, which tells me you can write mysteries. And don’t worry about having never been to Hawaii. Just write as if it was New York and we’ll change the names of the streets.”

In a few days I was on a plane heading for Los Angeles. I stayed at the Montecito, a haven for visiting New York show people. The guests included Robert Duvall, Yaphet Kotto, and Kheigh Diegh, an Asian-looking man who was really of Egyptian descent. He had played the evil Chinese general in the movie The Manchurian Candidate.

Leonard Freeman, the creator-producer of 5-0, was a short, muscular dynamo who had written for The Untouchables, among other shows. He told me about the trouble he had getting CBS to authorize six scripts of Hawaii 5-0. The TV executives were negative from the start. One of them said, “People who have been to Hawaii have already seen the place. And those who have never been there obviously don’t care. So why should anyone watch this thing?”

Such is the wisdom of the network suits. The original run of Hawaii 5-0 was a record-breaking 12 years, and the reruns will probably go on forever. People all over the world were all saying the McGarrett catchphrase, “Book ‘em, Danno. Murder One.” The very name 5-0 has become synonymous with cops in urban street jargon. All of which proves that when the network executives have a hit, it’s pure accident.

Jack Lord was signed to play Steve McGarrett, the boss of 5-0. In New York, Jack had been a graphic artist who went onstage one night to substitute for a sick friend. After that he took acting lessons at a prestigious drama school where the teacher told him, “You’ll never be an actor; you can only be a star.” He went on to play the lead in the TV series Stoney Burke (about a rodeo rider) and supporting roles in movies including The Billy Mitchell Story and the early James Bond film Dr. No.

With the leading man signed, we were set to roll on the pilot episode, except for one thing: Leonard didn’t have an actor to play the villain, Wo Fat, who was to be McGarrett’s nemesis.

“I got the name Wo Fat from a restaurant in Honolulu,” Leonard said, showing me a matchbook with that very name on it. “He’s going to be a maverick Chinese general who thinks the Chinese government is too soft on America, so he forms his own terrorist group. Who can play a guy like that?”

Once in a while, coincidence comes through. “I’ve got your man,” I said. “He’s at my hotel.” Kheigh Diegh got the role and plagued McGarrett for the next 12 years.

While major roles were played by local professional actors or actors flown in from the mainland, bit parts and extras were recruited right off the streets. Bernie Oseransky would walk through the streets of Honolulu and give out cards to people who looked like possibilities. The card, an invitation to take a screen test, was usually accepted with enthusiasm. If the man or woman passed the screen test, they got a part, sometimes just “Member of Crowd” or “First Gangster.”

Leonard always wanted fresh interesting faces, and there was no lack of them in Hawaii, but sometimes the location staff took shortcuts. Once I was sitting with Leonard at a Los Angeles screening of a new episode. Suddenly, his face became flushed with anger. He shouted across the room to Bob Sweeney, who was the top executive under him.

“If I see the doorman of the Kahala Hilton playing a gangster once more, some people around here are gonna be fired!” he yelled.

I stayed with the show for six years, writing or co-writing 32 episodes. I wrote them in my home on Long Island, and mailed them to CBS in California. This was before the days of fax and e-mail, so if there was a mad rush to have a script in the producer’s hands, I would take the Long Island Railroad to New York City and a taxi from Penn Station to Black Rock (the pet name for the CBS skyscraper in Manhattan). In the basement of Black Rock there was a mailroom where a mail pouch to Los Angeles was dispatched every night. The head of the mailroom, a fellow named Sam, got to know me well.

I would fly out to Hollywood about once a month to get their notes for changes. We would use my visit to discuss new episodes as well. Once I had the notes for revisions, I would fly back home to Long Island and start the process all over. Leonard was a stickler for good episode titles, the kind that grab an audience. Once he had me driving around Los Angeles for an hour trying to come up with a title that was Gothic, foreboding, and suggestive of great wealth. After driving past oil wells, mansions, and strip joints, I came back to his office with a suggestion: “Highest Castle, Deepest Grave.” He loved it. The episode co-starred Herbert Lom and France Nuyen as a father and daughter concealing a murder.

During this period, Leonard was having heart trouble. Sometime when I was in California he would ask me to go with him to the doctor’s office, and we would discuss 5-0 story lines on the way, or while sitting in the doctor’s waiting room.

There was an ironbound rule imposed on all the writers: never hand in a script that is more than 54 pages long. For the sake of economy, they didn’t want superfluous material that would later have to be cut. I warned them that my dialogue is terse and usually plays very fast. It didn’t matter to them; 54 pages is what they wanted.

One day I got a phone call from Hawaii. It was Bill Finnegan, who was in charge of production there. “We’ve got an emergency,” Bill said. “We’ve just finished shooting your episode, and the stopwatch tells us we’re a minute short. Can you write a minute of dialogue, and phone it in?” Remember, there were no faxes or e-mail then.

“There’s only one problem,” Bill added. “We’ve torn down all the sets except a telephone booth, so the minute has to be Jack in a phone booth.” I called him back about an hour later with the additional minute...set in a phone booth.

After I had written Hawaii 5-0 for three years, CBS decided it was time for me to visit the islands. As I mentioned before, I had the initial problem of how to visualize a place I’d never seen. I did, however, find a solution. My wife Judy and I had been to Puerto Rico several times on vacations. It occurred to me that Puerto Rico was of a similar size and had a similar climate to Hawaii. From then on, I used Puerto Rico for my visualizations and no one ever knew the difference.

But now, thanks to CBS, I was going to see the real thing. After landing in Hawaii, Judy and I took a taxi to the Kahala Hilton Hotel where CBS had arranged for us to stay. As the taxi pulled away from the airport, I scanned the lush terrain in amazement. “Judy, look!” I said. “Just like Puerto Rico!”

The accommodations at the Kahala Hilton were spectacular. Kahala is an elite residential section, a respectable distance from the tourist mecca of Waikiki. Jack Lord had an apartment near the hotel, and sometimes we would see him jogging on the beach early in the morning.

Jack had a bad reputation with actors. He was an uncompromising perfectionist who demanded that they arrive on the set on time and be letter-perfect in their lines—as he was. Those rules were sometimes ignored by guest stars who partied nonstop from the time they arrived in the islands. If they showed up late on the set with hangovers, not knowing their lines, Jack would berate them in front of the entire cast. They might be stars on Broadway or in Hollywood, but Jack was the king of Hawaii, and no one was allowed to forget it.

He once fired a permanent cast member for an entirely different reason. The actor made an anti-Semitic remark, which Jack would not tolerate. Ironically, the target of the slur, a public-relations man, was not Jewish.

The trip was a lovely vacation for Judy and me, but useless as far as ideas for the show were concerned. A visit to the Honolulu police department provided no inspiration. I went back to getting my ideas from newspaper articles, my own imagination, and my visions of Puerto Rico.

After returning to Long Island, I got a phone call from Bob Sweeney, a staff producer of the show. I knew from the tone of his voice that something was terribly wrong.

“I have bad news,” he said. “Len was taken to the hospital for heart surgery, and...,” there was a heavy pause, “...he didn’t make it.” It was the beginning of bypass operations, which are now as common as appendectomies. It was hard to imagine Hawaii 5-0 without the creative touch of Leonard Freeman. But the show went on.

Bob Sweeney called me one day thereafter, and said, “We want to do an episode about a traveling circus that comes to Hawaii. We don’t have a story line yet, but we’ve made a deal with a circus that’s in Kansas City right now, and soon they’ll be heading for Honolulu. I want you to leave for Kansas City right away—I’ll meet you there. We’ll absorb the circus atmosphere, meet the performers, and with luck we’ll have a story and a script by the time they get to Hawaii.”

Soon I was on a plane heading for Kansas City, Missouri. CBS had booked an enormous suite at the famous Muehlebach Hotel where U.S. presidents had stayed. The suite was for myself, Bob Sweeney, and Curtis Kenyon, the 5-0 story editor.

After our arrival, Bob sprang his big surprise. “I’m throwing a party for the circus people—all of them—strong men, trapeze artists, clowns, animal trainers, bareback riders, you name it. We’ll have it right here in the suite. There’s plenty of room. I just spoke to the caterers. They’ll be here tomorrow morning with food and booze for 50 people. It’ll be our chance to meet the circus folks, listen to their stories, get to know them as people. Exciting, isn’t it!?”

Reader, hear this advice. If you ever get the urge to throw a big party, don’t do it for circus people. It won’t be the party you’re expecting. Those statuesque sexy women in fishnet stockings who wave at you from the trapeze don’t exist. It’s an illusion. When you see them up close, they are homely females with thick Bulgarian accents, bad skin, uncombed stringy hair, and distinctly alcoholic breaths. And those are the good-looking ones.

Their male counterparts are even worse. They have the added threat of incredible strength, and when strength is mixed with alcohol and underlying belligerence, watch out! Arguments broke out—not with us, but with each other. The arguments turned into fights. Hotel furniture was thrown out of windows. We were afraid that people would be next. Hotel security had to be called, and finally, the police.

“Never again!” Bob said as he dodged an airborne chair. The 5-0 episode was entitled “Presenting in the Center Ring...Murder.” It nearly happened at the Muehlebach Hotel.

Within the framework of its action-adventure format, the show would sometimes make a social statement. An example of this can be found in an episode Iwrote called “Diary of a Gun.” It tracked a handgun through its possession by four different people. In each place the gun was involved in a tragedy or near-tragedy. The idea was avidly approved by Jack Lord, who was a staunch gun-control advocate.

There is a classic anecdote about Jack Lord and guns. One of Jack’s greatest fans was Elvis Presley, who, upon arriving in Hawaii, told his agent to set up a meeting with Jack Lord, his hero. When Elvis came to visit, he merely sat and stared in silence, he was so completely awed. At the end of the visit, Elvis gave Jack a present he had brought—a gold-plated gun. Jack was too much of a gentleman to tell his famous guest what he really thought of guns.

After working on the show for six years, I began to feel written-out. Aside from my own sense of drying up, I felt that the show had deteriorated in the hands of new managerial people. In their attempts to freshen the show up, they added new dimensions to Steve McGarrett’s character. Romantic angles were explored, old girlfriends showed up, that sort of thing. In doing this, they were violating one of Leonard Freeman’s original concepts. He had often told me, “I don’t want to know anything about McGarrett’s personal life. He exists only as a cop.” Leonard was right. Delving into McGarrett’s psyche gave the show a soap opera tinge. The original impact was compromised.

So now I watch the reruns occasionally, and when I catch one of my episodes, I get a nostalgic feeling, but unfortunately no money. Our contracts back then provided residuals for only ten runs, and we are long past that mark.

How did the networks get away with that? Book ‘em, Danno. Larceny One.

Jerome Coopersmith is known for his television work on Hawaii Five-O (1968), 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1974), and Armstrong Circle Theatre (1950). He is also a playwright and was nominated for Broadway's 1965 Tony Award as Best Author (Musical) for Baker Street.

Louise Penny’s thoughtful, deeply humane brand of crime fiction has won her a large and devoted following. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is, as his creator describes him, “a serene, content man who, at his core, is happy.” Gamache is also a bit of a philosopher, as can be seen in this excerpt from Penny’s latest novel, The Long Way Home.

Armand Gamache considered himself more an explorer than a hunter. The goal was to discover. And what he discovered could still surprise him.

How often had he questioned a murderer expecting to find curdled emotions, a soul gone sour? And instead found goodness that had gone astray.

He still arrested them, of course. But he’d come to agree with Sister Prejean that no one was as bad as the worst thing they’d done.

Armand Gamache had seen the worst. But he’d also seen the best. Often in the same person.

Penny’s novels have increased tourism in Quebec’s beautiful Eastern Townships, the locale of Gamache’s beloved village of Three Pines. You’ll want to get on the road to Three Pines yourself after reading Oline Cogdill’s chat with the author in this issue.

The lives of mystery writers are as varied as their books. In this issue, Jon L. Breen has put together a wide-ranging survey of memoirs and autobiographies by crime fiction authors as disparate as Agatha Christie, Chester Himes, and Sara Paretsky.

Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain, featured in a series that ranges from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, has been described as a “small-town hero.” He’s more than that, though. Sam is living through—and bearing perceptive witness to—the social upheavals that will transform the United States. Change has its price, though, and as Tom Nolan notes in “Riders of the Storm,” Sam is paying it more and more as the years go by.

The irresistibly corrupt Frank Underwood, played to oily perfection by Kevin Spacey, is the moral vacuum at the center of the political drama House of Cards. Frank and his equally formidable wife Claire (Robin Wright, in an astonishing performance), are the Washington power couple from hell. As Jake Hinkson notes in “High Crimes & Misdemeanors,” it’s not democracy—but it sure is entertaining.

Also in this issue, Joe Goodrich looks at the life of David Goodis, who has belatedly come to be appreciated as a master of noir, and Michael Mallory considers Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Yankee sleuth, Asey Mayo, also known as the “Codfish Sherlock.” Enjoy!

Kate StineEditor-in-chief

Teri Duerr

2014-10-09 22:14:45

Fall Issue #136 Contents

Features

Louise Penny: The Road to Three Pines

When she finally arrived at this small fictional village, located a little east of Montreal, just north of the Vermont border, Penny found a home and a hero—Chief Inspector Armand Gamache—with whom she plans to spend decades.by Oline H. Cogdill

Now known as the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel, it has acquired the works of several mystery authors whose novels will be made into original TV movies.Keeping with the mission of Hallmark, the authors whose work will be on the network write the lighter, softer type mysteries. Hallmark is calling these original two-hour movies its Original Mystery Wheel Franchise.

I think Hallmark has rounded up some of the best of the genre and I hope they add even more of these movies based on novels by writers who specialize in amateur sleuths. I can think of at least a dozen authors whose novels would fit right into the Hallmark family.

Deborah’s Donnelly’s novel Veiled Threats, part of her wedding planner series, will be the basis for the first Wedding Planner Mystery premiering at 9 p.m. ET/PT and 8 p.m. CT on Sunday Oct. 19.

I am a fan of Donnelly’s series and it is a perfect fit for the network. I recently viewed the film and it does justice to her series, combining the suspense with a bit of romance.

Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swensen Mystery series, beginning with Sugar Cookie Murder, is scheduled to air in 2015. Fluke’s culinary series has sold over six million copies in print and has been translated into seven languages. Since the series began in 2000, Fluke says she has baked more than 500,000 chocolate chip cookies for fans as well as countless pies, cakes, muffins and other sweets. Naturally, she includes recipes in her novels. Fluke’s series always makes me want to start baking and the films should too.

Another mouth-watering series that will come to Hallmark is The Gourmet Detective, based on the series by Peter King. I was a big fan of these witty novels in which a culinary whiz uses his mastery of food, drink and cooking to solve crimes of the culinary world. This series was a mini education in food as the nameless detective used his encyclopedic knowledge of culinary world to find valuable recipe that had been stolen or the murderer who committed his crime in the middle of a five-star restaurant. Dylan Neal (Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove) will star in and executive produce these movies. The Gourmet Detective is slated to begin in 2015.

It’s especially exciting news that Charlaine Harris’s Aurora Teagarden novels will be part of the Hallmark’s reboot. Librarian Aurora “Roe” Teagarden is a crime buff, lover of mystery novels and a member of the Real Murders Club, which meets to analyze famous crimes and mysteries. I loved this series by Harris and always hoped it would return. And if you don’t know who Charlaine Harris is, well, shame on you.

Aurora will be played by Candace Cameron Bure, who most of us remember from the TV series Full House. The first Aurora movie is slated for 2015.

What started Hallmark executives thinking about how these mystery novels were good fodder for TV must have been the reception the network received with its airing last year of the first Garage Sale Mystery. The movie starred the always appealing Lori Loughlin as a yard sale treasure hunter who uses her keen eye to solve crimes. The “Garage Sale Mystery” movies are based on the novel by Suzi Weinert.

Garage Sale Mystery: All That Glitters, the second installment of the “Garage Sale Mystery” movie series, will be aired at 9 p.m. Oct. 26.

Of course, you'll want to start reading the books before the films air.

Dogs and cats, as well as horse, hamsters and other animals, often show up in mysteries either as main character or in a supporting role.

So, in honor of Adopt a Shelter Dog Month, which is October, Animal Welfare Week, which was Oct. 5 to 11, and National Animal Shelter and Rescue Appreciation Week, which is Nov. 2-8, let’s give a shout out to those authors who show animals playing a role in their plots.

L.A. Kornetsky: Her Gin and Tonic mysteries pair up dog lover Ginny Mallard and her bartender, cat-loving, friend Teddy Tonica, along with some of their pets, in this cool series.

Robert Crais: Suspect-- Maggie, a German shepherd trained by the Marines and who was shot by a sniper that also killed her human partner in Afghanistan, becomes a K9 cop to LAPD officer Scott James who was severely wounded and traumatized during a shoot-out. The two become true partners.

Clea Simon: Cats, as well as the occasional parrot, play an important role in her three eries featuring music journalist Theda Krakow, pet expert Pru Marlowe, and grad student Dulcie Schwartz.

Spencer Quinn: Quinn’s delightful yet hardboiled, in a way, novels pair up one of the most lovable detectives, Chet, the wise and lovable canine narrator of the Chet & Bernie Mystery Series, who works alongside Bernie, a down-on-his-luck private investigator.

Laura Lippman: A greyhound, Doberman and an Italian greyhound—all rescues in some way or the other--are often the office companion of private detective Tess Monaghan.

Miranda James: Widowed librarian Charlie Harris and his Maine Coon, Diesel, solve crimes in the Cat in the Stacks series.

Dennis Lehane: The Drop, based on a short story, shows the power of a dog to break through to a person who has closed himself off from everyone.

Now it’s our readers turn to tell us their favorites.

Oline Cogdill

2014-10-15 11:10:00

Unnatural Murder: A Josie Corsino Mystery

Connie Dial’s Unnatural Murder: A Josie Corsino Mystery features the gimlet-eyed protagonist Captain Josie Corsino, who has been with the Hollywood division of the LAPD for decades. She’s seen everything. Police procedurals sometimes focus on the “hows” of a murder investigation at the expense of the motivational “whys,” but the strength of the Corsino books is that they delve into each area.

Author Dial, a 27-year veteran of the LAPD herself, has long been interested in the ways a criminal’s mind works. And like her protagonist, she is also fascinated by political snake nests. In Unnatural Murder, a group named the Police Protective League becomes involved in the case of a murdered Hollywood transvestite, and during the investigation, Corsino stumbles across a Machiavellian cover-up. When two more men—both ex-cops, both transvestites—are found dead, she suspects a close connection at the very top of the League’s political tree. The psychology of this unusual case in and of itself would be interesting enough, but paired with the psychology of the cops investigating Corsino has problems, too. She’s separated from her husband, vaguely hoping for a reunion, but when her former lover is temporarily transferred to the Hollywood division to work the case, her personal life implodes.

Cops are human, author Dial reminds us. Very human. The takeaway from Unnatural Murder is that despite all that messy humanity, cops really do try to do the right thing—even if the right thing will hurt them.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 16:54:58

Captain Josie Corsino is the gimlet-eyed protagonist at the heart of this excellent police procedural.

The Killing: Uncommon Denominator

Karen Dionne is a compelling writer, even when she’s playing in someone else’s sandbox, as she does gracefully in Uncommon Denominator, a prequel to the AMC series The Killing, which follows the murder investigations of Seattle homicide detectives Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder.

Because this story is set before the events of Season One, the duo are not yet acquainted; while Linden is indeed working homicide, Holder is working undercover in narcotics. Eventually, their paths do cross, as the death of a meth cooker in an explosion and the execution-style killing of a man whose body is left in a shipping container are found to be connected. The book works as both a police procedural and a thriller, as Linden, Holder, and company methodically pursue justice.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 18:34:32

A prequel to the AMC series The Killing, which follows Seattle homicide detectives Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder.

Shots Fired

C. J. Box’s Shots Fired is subtitled Stories From Joe Pickett Country, Pickett being the protagonist of Box’s bestselling novels. Pickett doesn’t figure in all ten stories here, but he’s in several, including the first and the last, neither of which has appeared in print before. The first, “One- Car Bridge,” presents a rancher so hard on his employees (and everyone else) that he deserves whatever accident befalls him, even if it’s not an accident. The last, “Shots Fired: A Requiem for Ander Esti” is based on Box’s own experience, and it finds Pickett investigating a supposedly open-and-shut shooting that’s not quite so open-and-shut.

My favorite title among the stories is “Pronghorns of the Third Reich.” Pickett doesn’t appear, but the story turns out to be as incredible as the title sounds. This is only Box’s second-favorite title. He provides an introduction that tells which one he likes best, but I’ll let you find that out for yourself.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 18:45:04

Everyone's favorite Wyoming game warden features prominently in ten new stories.

One Kick

Jordan Foster

There’s a difference between a vigilante and a hero spurred on by past events, hell-bent on righting the world’s wrongs. Vigilantes are all about the result (read: lots of killing), but heroes, even the damaged ones, know that the ends don’t always justify the means. Heroes know that a heap of wrongs (read: a trail of corpses in their wake) don’t make a right. Kick Lannigan, the fiercely independent and stubbornly capable protagonist in the first of Chelsea Cain’s (Let Me Go, etc.) phenomenal new series, is most definitely a hero. Kidnapped at age six and rescued five long years—and many practical skills—later, she’s a force to be reckoned with, equally adept with a handgun as she is with a paper clip and a set of locked handcuffs. Kick’s obsession with child abductions both dictates her life and provides constant reminders of the psychological scars she carries. Every time an amber alert is issued, Kick is waiting, ready not to punish the kidnappers but to try, in vain, to save herself time and time again.

In this novel, it’s the disappearance of two children close to her Portland, Oregon, home that puts Kick on high alert, particularly when she’s approached by the mysterious John Bishop, a man with as many fancy—and dangerous—toys as Kick has in her mini arsenal. She reluctantly joins forces with Bishop and sets off on a quest to recover young Adam Rice and Mia Turner. It’s Kick’s complicated, intractable relationship with her past—and particularly the man who kidnapped her and whose approval she both craves and detests—that make her a believably flawed heroine. She’s not just a 21-year-old with a gun (and some throwing stars): she’s a woman grappling with the aftermath of an event that most of us can’t even fathom. And we desperately want her to succeed, at any cost.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 19:18:16

The disappearance of two children puts gun-for-hire Kick Lannigan into action in this new series.

The Day of Atonement

Hank Wagner

As disaster looms, a young boy’s parents send him to another world. There, he learns that he possesses abilities that set him apart from other men. Returning to his homeland seeking vengeance, he launches a secret campaign against those he holds responsible. Ultimately, he learns the price of vengeance is often higher than most can bear. But he soldiers on, intent on justice.

So, is this The Count of Monte Cristo, with touches of Batman, Zorro, Superman, and The Princess Bride thrown in for spice? No, it’s David Liss’ latest historical novel, featuring Sebastian Foxx, a native of Portugal whose world is torn apart by the Inquisition. Spirited away to London, he apprentices with bounty hunter Benjamin Weaver (star of three previous novels by Liss, who has also penned graphic novels featuring Daredevil, The Spider, and The Shadow), learning all he needs to return home and wreak havoc on Jesuit Inquisitor Pedro Azinheiro. Although he has planned every step, he finds that fate is ready to throw him a curve at every juncture.

Liss once again earns the mantle of master of the historical thriller, delivering a rousing adventure even as he brings 1755 Lisbon to vivid life. Sebastian Foxx is a winning, nuanced hero, a quick-thinking romantic whose lethal talents are put on ample display in several well-executed set pieces. Brimming with intrigue, violence, humor, and danger, Liss’ intelligent plot and surefooted storytelling will appeal to a wide audience, providing thrills for those who appreciate comics, historical novels, and fine literature alike.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 19:41:22

Surefooted storytelling that will appeal to those who appreciate comics, historical novels, and fine literature alike.

Elective Procedures

Betty Webb

There’s a giant helping of woo-woo in Merry Jones’ Elective Procedures, in which several ghosts help amateur sleuth Elle Harrison stay alive while she solves a murder.

Elle (first introduced in The Trouble With Charlie) is vacationing with three gal pals at a Mexican resort catering to women undergoing cosmetic surgery. Elle has no intention of changing her own looks, but the already gorgeous Jen is convinced she needs to be even more beautiful, and despite the warnings of her friends, has scheduled several nips, tucks, and enlargements. Unfortunately, among the other resort guests is a killer. The murders are grisly (one involves a knife-shredded face, the other, a brains-plattering fall from a high-rise), and the plot is baroque enough to be eyebrow-raising.

But the true appeal of this witty mystery comes from Elle’s hilariously messed-up friends. Becky, pining for love, falls for a gigolo. Susan, a defense attorney, is an iPhone addict. Jen has a deliciously foul mouth, but, once her elective procedures are done, can only sputter an approximation of her favorite four-letter words. (“Those goddabbed pills dote work—I deed subthigg that works. I’b id terrible paid. I deed drugs.”)

But the most remarkable of all Elle’s friends are the three ghosts. Two are the spirits of murdered cosmetic surgery patients. The third ghost is that of Charlie, Elle’s dead husband. A serial cheat in life, Charlie is now atoning for his former behavior by riding shotgun with his former spouse, once even saving her from death by drowning. This is funny stuff, even for readers not inclined toward books about ghosts. It’s a rollicking read, not necessarily to be taken seriously, simply to be enjoyed for the side-splitting romp that it is.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 19:57:12

A side-splitting romp of a mystery with a dose of ghosts, murder, and makeovers.

Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene

Jon L. Breen

No mystery-world figure is more deserving of what librarians and academics call a Festschrift than the publisher of Crippen & Landru, author of the definitive John Dickson Carr biography, and longtime critic, scholar, and historian Douglas G. Greene. That the result is one of the finest essay collections on the detective-story genre ever published, offering one superb piece after another, is a tribute both to the inspiration of the honoree and the meticulousness of editor Curtis Evans. The emphases on classical detection, locked-room problems, and the detective short story reflect Greene’s particular interests, but the range of subjects and viewpoints is impressive.

Some who have written extensively on their subjects elsewhere cover fresh ground here, including John Curran on Agatha Christie’s occasional forays into impossible crime, Barry Pike on Margery Allingham’s lesser-known and sometimes pseudonymous “left-handed” work, Julia Jones updating a key point in Allingham’s biography, Tom Nolan on poetry in Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case, and Jack Seabrook on some of Fredric Brown’s heavy-drinking detectives. There’s excellent biographical information in some of the survey articles: David Whittle on Edmund Crispin, Martin Edwards on Anthony Berkeley, Mauro Boncompagni on the Q. Patrick/Patrick Quentin/Jonathan Stagge team, Steven Steinbock on his fellow magician Jake Talbot, and Peter Lovesey on the Detection Club’s famous initiation prop Erik the Skull. Two essays tantalize English-language readers with descriptions of untranslated work: Henrique Valle on Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s mostly unfinished detective stories and Patrick Ohl on prolific contemporary French writer René Reouven. Editor Evans, one of his own best contributors, finds some good in the early work of the much-maligned Carolyn Wells, surveys T.S. Eliot’s mystery criticism, and (most significantly) definitively debunks the oft-repeated claim that Raymond Chandler hated puzzle mysteries and English mysteries generally.

Among other highlights are Helen Szamuely on recent book-length Doyle and Sayers pastiches and P.D. James’ Jane Austen sequel; and Joseph Goodrich on Ellery Queen’s radio career, reproducing a long and previously unpublished letter by Manfred Lee regarding the cancellation of the show. Among the other contributors are Michael Dirda (on Carr) and Marvin Lachman (on Doug Greene and Crippen & Landru). Others not mentioned due to time and space constraints are equally praiseworthy. Full disclosure: I contribute a brief piece on some short story series without enough entries to make a full book.

The book concludes with a bibliography of Doug Greene’s writings on mystery fiction, 1978-2014, and of Crippen & Landru’s publications, 1994-2014.

Teri Duerr

2014-10-14 20:11:24

A nod to publisher of Crippen & Landru, author of the definitive John Dickson Carr biography, and longtime critic, scholar, and historian Douglas G. Greene.